ChatGPT API (gpt-3.5-turbo) and Whisper API
OpenAI opens ChatGPT's model to developers as gpt-3.5-turbo at one-tenth the price of text-davinci-003, and ships a paid Whisper speech-to-text API.
First official API for the model behind ChatGPT, using a chat-message format. The roughly 10x price cut versus text-davinci-003 made LLM features cheap enough to embed everywhere. Whisper large-v2 became a hosted endpoint.
- Date
- Wednesday, 1 March 2023
- Lab
- OpenAI
- Kind
- product
- Access
- closed API
- Price
- gpt-3.5-turbo $0.002 per 1K tokens at launch (search-reported); Whisper $0.006/min
Figures
| Measure | Value | Measured by |
|---|---|---|
| gpt-3.5-turbo price vs text-davinci-003 | 1/10th OpenAI described the ChatGPT API as priced at one tenth of text-davinci-003 | company |
| Whisper API price | 36 cents per hour of audio about $0.006 per minute | company |
The $0.002/1K figure comes from a search-result summary of press coverage; Simon Willison's post confirms the 1/10th-of-davinci pricing and the Whisper rate.
Sources
- simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/1/openai-introducing-chatgpt-and-whisper-apis
- hidekazu-konishi.com/entry/openai_gpt_model_release_timeline.html
This record was checked against its sources on 6 October 2026. How we check